[Quote No.36496] Need Area: Friends > General "...anything [regardless of which economic theory -Keynesian, monetarist, supply-side, etc - except Austrian which advises against any government interference in any market] that has proven to be a useful [government fiscal or monetary] policy tool in the past is a likely candidate to be a tool in the present [to meet the aims of government and the political elite, while being necessarily dressed up in new euphemisms and rationales to induce political support from academia and the populace]." - Chris MartensonChris Martenson.com [http://www.chrismartenson.com/martensonreport/how-play-greatest-gold-silver-bull-market-our-lifetime?utm_source=goldmoney&utm_medium=syndication&utm_content=link1&utm_campaign=59850 ]Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.36601] Need Area: Friends > General "[All countries have certain needs and will consider going to war if they are denied. These days politicians refer to them as 'security' issues - i.e food security, power-energy security, etc. Understanding these needs often explain otherwise inexplicable political strategies, tactics, comments and behaviours.] ...why did Japan decide to build nuclear power plants they knew could be potentially dangerous only 15 years or so after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The answer has to do with World War II. Japan has no resources, other than rock, wood, water and its industrious people. All raw material to this island nation must be imported by sea.
Japan entered World War II to seize more land in Manchuria and China, and to gain vital resources in South Asia. In 1940, most of Japan’s heavy oil, and all its aviation fuel, came from the world’s largest oil producer, the United States. Interestingly, the US was also Germany’s leading oil supplier.
When in late 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt sought (my view) to push Japan into the war by imposing an embargo of oil and scrap metal on Japan, Tokyo had a two-year stockpile of oil.
Tokyo’s military-dominated government faced a stark choice: go immediately to war in hopes of a quick victory while there was still oil, or watch its oil stores dwindle way and thus face military impotence. War was the choice.
Japan’s leading military officer, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, warned Japan was going to war for oil, and would be defeated because of lack of oil.
In 1941, Japan’s economy was only 10% of the size of the US economy in what was to become history’s first industrialized war.
Japanese strategists had seen how Britain’s total naval blockade of the Central Powers in World War I brought about the final defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary by starvation, not battlefield defeat.
Yamamoto’s warning was prophetic. Japan could not sustain its maritime supply lines to South Asia and the oilfields of Indonesia and Malaysia, both former European colonies.
By mid-1944, a brilliant, audacious campaign by US submarines had cut off nearly all of Japan’s imports of raw material and oil. The winter of 1944-45 was the coldest in 20 years. Japanese, facing starvation, subsisted on roots and grass. As in the current Fukushima disaster, there was no fuel to cremate huge numbers of bodies.
Japan did not import a single barrel of oil in 1945. Without oil, its navy could not leave port, its aircraft could not fly. Pathetic attempts were made to make aviation fuel by boiling and distilling pine roots.
The powerful US Fifth Fleet that was nearing Japan alone used more fuel in a year than all of Japan. Without fuel, Japan could not fight. Modern mechanized warfare runs on oil. Adolf Hitler also failed to understand this critical strategic point.
While Japan starved, its cities were laid waste by the most lethal bombing raids in history Nearly half of Japan’s cities, 66 in all, sustained 40% or more total damage from a rain of fire bombs dropped by Gen. Curtiss LeMay’s US B-29’s.
Thirty percent of Japan’s urban population was killed, wounded or left homeless; 2.5 million buildings were destroyed. Most Japanese cities were built of wood and paper – as many still were around Fukushima – perfect targets for LeMay’s fire bombs.
On 9 March, 1945, US B-29’s dropped 1,667 tons of fire bombs on Tokyo. Fifteen square miles of downtown Tokyo were burned to the ground in a gigantic holocaust. An estimated 185,000 civilians died and another 100,000 were severely wounded – nearly all by burns.
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki inflicted an immediate total of 200,000 dead and wounded, with many more in ensuring years and decades.
After the war, Japan’s leadership concluded their nation had to have energy independence, even if it meant from potentially dangerous nuclear power. Japan must never again be left helpless. Oil was too precious to use for power generation. It had to be stockpiled for strategic use and transportation.
So Japan took a calculated risk." - Eric MargolisHe is a journalist, historian and author. This extract was taken from an article he published April 11, 2011.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.36631] Need Area: Friends > General "Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law,
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed." - Lord Alfred Tennyson(1809 – 1892), Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular poets in the English language. This is a famous section from his poem, 'In Memoriam A. H. H.', Canto 56, published in 1850. A. H. H. was Tennyson's friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The poet used the elegy to pose questions about the apparent conflict between love as the basis of the Christian religion, civilisation and Human interdependence and the callousness of nature and its survival of the fittest-strongest-most forceful or ruthless evolution.Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.36681] Need Area: Friends > General "[Capitalism Vs socialism or communism:] Neglecting the benefits of using resources more productively misses one of the main economic lessons of the past half century. Transfers, grants and redistribution did little to raise living standards in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Capitalist development and open economies lifted vastly more people out of poverty in a decade than welfare state policies had achieved in 50 years... After one generation, a one percentage point difference in growth rate becomes a 25% difference in per-capita income." - Allan H MeltzerProfessor of Public Policy at the Tepper School, Carnegie Mellon University Author's Info on Wikipedia - Author on ebay - Author on Amazon - More Quotes by this AuthorStart Searching Amazon for GiftsSend as Free eCard with optional Google Image

[Quote No.36682] Need Area: Friends > General "[Always be aware that others - in politics, war, business, etc. - may try to use strategies of surprise and force:] In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies, on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains." - Thucydides(c. 460 BC – c. 400 BC)
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